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An idiot acquaintance of mine was touting that stupid motivational quote that "The Chinese word for 'crisis' is made up of the words for 'danger' and 'opportunity.'"

Isn't that kind of like saying "The English word for 'honest' is made up of the words for 'prostitute' and 'home?'"

Or "The English word for 'present' literally means 'already arranged to be delivered.'"  (There's a deep metaphor there about gift-giving, I'm sure of it.)

Any other funny examples you can think of?  Anyone who actually knows Chinese want to share an opinion?  

That might be a very rubbery translation of words that sound similar, kinda like how "May you live in interesting times" isn't actually a curse or insult in Chinese, and probably not something anybody in China actually said until some outsider mistranslated it,but it was probably a misattributed/poorly translated quote that means something entirely different and is a seperate, detached statement that arguably can't be used as an insult or a curse...

I assume they're talking about the characters in the written form of the word. I don't know anything about Chinese, but in Japanese, some words are written using the kanji for different unrelated words. I don't know any real examples off the top of my head, but to make something up, it might be something like "forest" being written with the kanji for "many" and the kanji for "tree". If Chinese hanzi work the same way, that motivational quote might make more sense for Chinese words than for English words.

My Chinese isn't that good, but it think your acquaintance might be technically correct, depending on your interpretation of the Chinese symbols. In Chinese, often multiple symbols, often with their own individual meaning, are used to construct a new word. I can't find out how to type Chinese in the forums, but the word 'train' is for example made up of the symbols for 'fire' and 'car' (which is quite logical as the first trains were coal-powered). 

However, the problems with Chinese characters is that they tend to have more than one meaning, even if they have the same rough sound, because Chinese is a tonal language. The word for mother, for example, is made up of the symbols for 'female' and 'horse'. Besides being a perfect way to accidentally insult someone in Chinese, the symbol for 'horse' is used because the word 'horse' sounds really similar to 'mother'. 'Ni ma hao ma' for example means 'how is your mother?' ('ma' being a word to indicate a question, and also partially uses the symbol for 'horse'), while 'Ni ma hao ma?' means 'how is your horse?

I don't know the word for 'crisis' in Chinese, but I imagine that it's a similar situation, in that it could possibly be interpreted as being made up of two certain words, but it could also be interpreted differently.

It is true that crisis (危機) is composed of the Hanzi for "danger" and "crucial point". The latter could but isn't used as "opportunity" in that context, so the way I see it, it's more like saying "rebar" means "to ban again".